March 2020 – Necromantic

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Gretel & Hansel: A Modern Grimm Tale

Gretel & Hansel is a bit of a film after my own heart. Osgood (Oz) Perkins has done a wonderful job of crafting a horror movie which is subtle yet still intense. It is splendid to look at in its minute details. Down to the beautiful fanned windows in all the dwellings, even the crude bowls and spoons on the table where Gretel sits with her mother for a few moments at the start… The lighting is exquisite, and the forest scenes are so gorgeously shot, stark but lovely.

This new interpretation of the Grimms’ story takes place in a surreal land that falls somewhere between realism and a stylized fantasy. It is not bound within its traditional historical setting; rather, it is a fluid amalgamation of its fairytale epoch fused with modern aesthetics. There is the striking, minimalist triangle which appears as part of the movie’s occult symbolism, and the exterior shape of the witch’s house is utterly modern, not at all reminiscent of a medieval dwelling, or like the gingerbread house of our childhood fancies.

Atmospheric, ominous, moody, yet elegant, Gretel & Hansel is something like a Margaret Atwood or Angela Carter fairy tale in cinematic form, but more taut and minimal. Early on, the film quotes the song from “The Juniper Tree,” perhaps the most violent fairy tale of all time, which begins, “My mother she killed me, my father he ate me…” This gives a foretaste of the dark direction of the film, whose more macabre moments still remain subdued and which always retains an understated but eerily beautiful quality.

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“I Want to Say Goodbye Human”: Paintings by Akiko Ijichi

The still, slightly eerie beauties in Akiko Ijichi‘s watercolors participate in a sinister serenity. Their direct but almost unseeing, melancholy, red-lidded gaze has a silent languor, a breath of the simultaneously sterile and erotic; grim passion. The theme of her work is antinomy, the contradiction and struggle between opposites, life and death, evil and holiness, happiness and lament. Ijichi uses traditional nihonga techniques to achieve a clarity and lightness of effect emphasizing the opalescent pallor of the girls depicted, the delicacy of the flowers with which they are surrounded and garlanded. It has an intermittent sparkle or scintillating quality, as if dusted with gold powder, due to the crushed mineral pigments used in her painting.

The marriage of traditional techniques with the modern aspect of the subjects, whom she describes as like shrine maidens, creates an interesting juxtaposition. These palely luminescent beings seem to be giving up their humanity or exchanging childhood innocence, the path of the straight and narrow, or some such unimpeachable condition of life, for the bittersweetness of darker dreams, fairy tales gone wrong. Wolf-girls, flower-girls, butterfly-girls, their pearl-sheened skin tinted with rosy hues is in the embrace of death, turning them into beautiful memento mori, portents of deathlike change.

Two posters and a monograph of her work are currently available on AkaTako.

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Malicious Birth: The Art of Januz Miralles

Philippines-based artist Januz Miralles uses photo manipulation as well as traditional painting techniques to create phantasmal and ethereal works where feminine figures are obscured by fading, by hand-drawn illustration, and by layered brush strokes. It is all brought together into a molten, haunting effect in which identity is heightened at the same time it is negated. The textural contrasts and poetic veiling and distorting of these images give them a dreaminess, an enigma, and a fluid or evaporating sense of movement both vague and violent.

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Twin Temple: Sex Magick

The following music video from self-styled “Satanic doo-wop” duo Twin Temple is charming, campy, fun, and lighthearted, with its nostalgically vintage palette and occult imagery.